Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening to you all, giant-killers, dragon-slayers, stompers of scorpions! You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. And my most-esteemed co-host, the Very Reverend Dr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, in the midst of the swamp, and I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in the beautiful forests and hills of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and we’re live! And if you are listening to us live, although we know that 99% of you are not, but if you are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346, and you can talk to us! We’re going to get to your calls in the second half of the show, and our own Matushka Trudi will be taking those calls.

Fr. Stephen De Young: We’ve got some competition tonight, too. I don’t know if you know that.

Fr. Andrew: Oh yeah?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they’re having the WrestleMania XL press conference in about an hour, live from Las Vegas.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, so you’re saying we have to get this done in an hour so you can—

Fr. Stephen: No. No, it’s fine. I’m just saying, you know, people, attention diverted. And the heir to the Swanson food fortune is interviewing Vladimir Putin right now as well.

Fr. Andrew: I heard that!

Fr. Stephen: Or at least it’s airing. So I could’ve told them not to go up against Lord of Spirits, like, that’s a bad programming decision to try and compete with us.

Fr. Andrew: I think there’s a big audience overlap there, for sure.

Fr. Stephen: But what can you do? What can you do?

Fr. Andrew: It’s a dog-eat-dog world here in internet radio, yeah. Well, that said, when speaking of Jesus as the Messiah, most people will point to the many Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah that he fulfilled, the acts that he did which fit with what the prophets foretold. And this is, of course, a good and correct thing to do. Yet such an affirmation may overlook a question we should ask about what is actually happening in the gospels. What did the people who met Jesus in person mean when they pointed at him and identified him as the Messiah? How did they recognize him to be the Messiah even when he had not yet done most, or in some cases any, of the actions that we now look back on in retrospect and match up with his whole life and ministry? What was it about their experience of him on the ground that made them say, “This is the Christ”? So, Fr. Stephen, is this actually just another episode defining what the word “messiah” means?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: But also no!

Fr. Andrew: Like that pirate in that meme… Yeah, I don’t even know what show that’s from, but that’s the “Yes, but actually no” meme.

Fr. Stephen: It looks like Wallace and Gromit to me, but…

Fr. Andrew: Mm, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, we do need to disambiguate here a little at the beginning, because we already did a full episode sort of on the concept of a messiah, especially in Second Temple Jewish literature—the different concepts of the Messiah, sometimes of messiahs and that kind of thing. And we are not retreading that here tonight, at least not that much. This is, as in your intro, we’re coming at this from another angle.

But so we talked about all that. We talked about meshiach in Hebrew, christos in Greek, meaning the anointed one, how this was particularly associated with an anointed king, with the Davidic king. We also talked about how there were— We find in Second Temple literature, with some groups they were expecting multiple messiahs, like a messiah who’s the son of David who’s a king; a messiah who’s sort of a priestly messiah who was going to restore the Temple and the priesthood to its proper worship, sort of purify it. And the kingly messiah was more focused on basically getting rid of the Romans, but in a broader sense removing Israel or Judea from an era of foreign oppressors, to have its own independent kingdom again.

But so all of that was sort of about: What was the messianic expectation? When you said the word “messiah” to a first-century Jewish person, what was in their head? So that was approaching it from one angle, and what we’re doing tonight is coming from a different angle, as you said. Because when the New Testament authors—and that’s including the authors of the gospels, but also St. Paul, St. James, St. Jude, St. Peter—when they write the documents that become the New Testament, the key claim that every one of those documents is making, that it’s based on, the key idea from which everything else flows, is that Jesus is the Messiah. They almost all—

Fr. Andrew: John’s gospel ends, particularly, “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, that Jesus is the Christ.”

Fr. Stephen: And all the letters, within the first several words, have “Jesus Christ.” We hear that so much… There are literally people out there who think that’s Jesus’ last name, like his parents were Joseph and Mary Christ, and then he was… [Laughter] At one point in the past, when I was teaching a high school Sunday school class, I had a student ask me what Jesus’ middle name was, because they had that presupposition.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: And so I gave the whole explanation: That’s a title. That means the Messiah. That’s not his last name. And the response to me was: “No, no. I know it starts with an H.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So they ended up kind of telling on their parents. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, well, maybe they’re just, you know, “Messianics,” as they call them, so they were calling him Ha Meshiach.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there we go.

Fr. Andrew: There we go, see? I want to think the best of everyone.

Fr. Stephen: With a Hebrew definite article. There we go.

Fr. Andrew: I want to think the best of everybody. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But so every time you see in an English New Testament “Jesus Christ,” you should— What you should think in your head, what that’s actually saying is “Jesus the Messiah.” And so that claim gets made early and often, in every text.

So what do they mean when they say that? Somebody may immediately say, “Well, all those things you said in the other episode that they were expecting about the Messiah. They were just saying that’s Jesus.” But a bunch of those things Jesus didn’t do, at that time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there’s some he hasn’t even quite done yet.

Fr. Stephen: So Jesus didn’t overthrow the Romans. Romans were still around. In fact, the Romans became more brutal and destroyed Jerusalem. He didn’t go and restore the priesthood in the Temple—on this earth, like the physical building. Didn’t get rid of the Sadducees. The Romans did, but not in the way the Messiah was supposed to. And they weren’t saying, “Well, okay, there’s this checklist of messianic expectations, and, well, we got the majority of these checked off from Jesus, so he must be the Messiah.” And they very much did not think of it in terms of Jesus fulfilling a list of prophecies in the Old Testament.

Let me expand on that for a minute, because yeah. This is a problem in Christian apologetics. I know a lot of people—

Fr. Andrew: We should say, by the way, just to head off all the people that are throwing whatever against the wall: we’re not saying that Jesus did not fulfill those prophecies. We’re not saying that.

Fr. Stephen: No, no.

Fr. Andrew: He did. And will!

Fr. Stephen: But what I’m going to say is if a Jewish person says to you, “Name one prophecy of the Old Testament that Jesus uniquely fulfills,” you’re not going to be able to come up with one that’s going to satisfy him.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s not like they haven’t had a chance to read the thing.

Fr. Stephen: But you’re going to say, “Well, see, Jesus was born in Bethlehem.” Lots of people born in Bethlehem. [Laughter] “He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey.” Lots of people did that, too. Like, that’s not how Old Testament prophecy works. And it’s not even like: “Well, okay, yeah, lots of people did each of those individual things, but we’re going to ball up a whole bunch and say: See, Jesus did all these things.” And then the skeptical person is going to look at you and say, “Yeah, that’s confirmation bias, because he didn’t overthrow the Romans, he didn’t restore the physical Temple, he didn’t…” da-da-da-da-da-da-dah. So that’s not how prophecy works. That’s not how prophecy works.

Jesus does fulfill every prophecy about the Messiah, but prophecy doesn’t work in that sort of specific prediction, check-it-off-the-list kind of way, and we’ve talked about that before on the show, so nobody should be too shocked.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, major sub-theme of this entire program.

Fr. Stephen: But don’t take that bait is what I’m saying. [Laughter] And also it’s important—sorry, preterists—that they were not saying, “Oh, hey, that whole Messiah thing, Jesus took care of that, so don’t worry about it any more.” And that’s part of this incorrect view of prophecy, like: “Oh, that prophecy’s fulfilled? Okay, forget about it. Okay, it’s done.” That’s not what they meant either, because Jesus is the Messiah is what they’re saying, not he was; not he was the Messiah and therefore this Messiah stuff is over: he is the Messiah.

But by saying he is the Messiah, they’re also not saying he will be the Messiah. They’re not just saying he will be the Messiah. What do I mean by that? Well, we’ve talked on the show before in the messiah episode and elsewhere that there is, within the Hebrew Scriptures, this idea that the Messiah would come and then the Messiah would return, and that there is some period of time in between. For example, probably the locus classicus for this is Psalm 110 (109 in the Greek), which, as we’ve mentioned before on the show probably several times, is the most quoted Old Testament text in the New Testament, that talks about the Messiah reigning in the midst of his enemies. “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet.’ ” So that there is this period where the Messiah reigns in the midst of his enemies. We talked about the long time in Daniel; we talked— There’s a bunch of places. And the Messiah ultimately returns to judge the living and the dead. The day of the Lord, the Messiah judges the living and the dead.

But they weren’t just saying Jesus is going to be the Messiah when he comes back; they weren’t just saying, “Oh, yeah, he didn’t do some of that stuff the first time he was here. He’s going to do that stuff later when he comes back.” That’s not what they’re saying. They’re saying he is the Messiah. And they started saying this about him pretty early on, his disciples, St. Peter in particular, before he had died, before he had risen, before they even understood. St. Peter identifies Jesus as the Messiah and then argues with him about whether he’s going to die or not. So clearly that element he still doesn’t understand, but he’s still identifying Jesus as the Messiah for some reason.

And so the New Testament texts, whether we’re talking about the gospels that are narrating Jesus’ life and ministry and then portraying him as the Messiah, or we’re talking about in the epistles that are speaking from a different vantage point but describing who Jesus is, what he does, what he has done, what he will do… They are also framing him as the Messiah. Messiah is his identity is the claim that’s being made. Without having done those things, they still make this identification. So what is it that they saw that caused them to make this conclusion?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and that’s what our episode is about tonight!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So this may be a new record. We’re this far into a new episode and we haven’t even started the episode!

Fr. Andrew: But we’ve already revealed what it’s really all about.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, we’re just disambiguating the topic. Right, so that’s what we’re going to be talking about. And we’re going to be talking about three main things that they identify about Jesus. And, conveniently, this show has three halves.

Fr. Andrew: Hey!

Fr. Stephen: Because as Aristotle told us, everything that comes in threes is perfect. That’s where we’re going. That’s where we’re going tonight. So for the rest of this first half, we’re going to be talking about the first one of these things, and that is that they came to see Jesus as the Messiah because they saw that Jesus embodied Israel, the people of Israel. The experience, the historical experience of Israel was embodied in and by Jesus as a person.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you don’t hear this talked about very much, Jesus as living out the story of Israel in himself.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but this is— Especially, for example, St. Matthew’s gospel, you’re not going to get at all if you don’t get this, and you’re not going to understand what he’s doing with Old Testament quotes. I mean, right off the bat you get things in St. Matthew’s gospel like Herod starts to murder all of the children under two years old from in and around Bethlehem. St. Joseph and the Theotokos flee with Christ to Egypt and then after they hear Herod dies they come back, and St. Matthew says, “As it is written, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’ ” If you’re a modern person, you look at that and go: “Hold on a second,” and you flip back into the Old Testament—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is in Hosea 11.

Fr. Stephen: And you say, “Wait, this is talking about Israel. This is God talking about bringing Israel out of Egypt, like in the exodus. This isn’t talking about Jesus going to Egypt for a little while and then coming back.” And then, if you’re a conservative modern person, you say, “No! Hosea was talking about Jesus going to Egypt and coming back; it’s not about Israel!”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but all you have to do is read the second verse in that chapter to know that it definitely is about Israel. It says, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son,” and then: “The more they were called, the more they went away; they kept sacrificing to the Baals and burning offerings to idols.” That’s not Jesus!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, or his mother or St. Joseph.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So this is very clear, and this is not St. Matthew just being goofy and taking things radically out of context. He’s trying to communicate: Jesus in his life is embodying, recapitulating, experiencing the experience of Israel, because why did Israel go into Egypt? Israel was brought into Egypt through Joseph to save the family from a famine. And then once that danger was well over, God brought Israel out of Egypt. So in the same way, Jesus in his infancy, as Israel was in their infancy, is protected by going into Egypt, but then is brought back out of Egypt.

This is what’s going on with Christ’s temptation in the desert. He goes out into the desert for 40 days and 40 nights, and this is— And there he’s tempted or tested. And those verbs that are used of Jesus— A lot of people go down these psychological weird trails with this, like: “No, Jesus was actually tempted, like he thought about doing bad things.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no. [Laughter] There are whole weird heretical theologies from the 19th century based on trying to figure that out.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. This is— These are the same verbs that are used to describe what happens with Israel for the 40 years in the desert, 40 years in the wilderness. There they were tested. And if you’ve read your Torah, your Pentateuch, you know that Israel failed, and that whole generation died in the desert, whereas Jesus has the parallel experience but succeeds—but succeeds. He is tested, gives glory to God, does not worship other gods, is dependent upon God for food and water, like the manna and the water. Remember, Israel grumbled and said they were brought out there to die and all this. So the “temptations” that Jesus deals with from the devil are not random; they are all the things that Israel fell into in that same experience. So Jesus re-embodies that, but successfully, but faithfully to God.

We just not that long ago had a Theophany episode, and we talked about, in the hymnography and in the Old Testament readings, how Christ passing through the Jordan was connected to Joshua leading the people through the Jordan, which parted in front of them as they came into the land in order to conquer it. So Christ shares that experience as he comes back into the land. We’ve talked about— I guess we have to mention giants once per episode. [Laughter] Some people think it’s all we ever talk about, so if we don’t mention it at least once per episode, those people would be proven wrong, and we can’t have that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we don’t want them to be wrong.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, what next? If we do an episode where we don’t mention giants, next we’re going to start quoting Church Fathers or something.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Or not always mentioning Enoch.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! You blew it! You just did!

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Dang it! [Laughter] This many days since Enoch was mentioned on The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Fr. Stephen: But we’ve mentioned before how the view at least of— Regardless of what you want to think, think what you will, but the view of the common Jewish people of the first century was that the unclean spirits, the demons that are possessing people, whom Christ was casting out of people, that those were the spirits of the dead giants, meaning they were the same enemies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that was the belief at the time.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Again, you can think whatever you want about that belief. We’re not saying that this is what the Scripture says or this is what the Church teaches, no, just saying.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the prominence in the first three gospels of exorcisms is part of this, again, portraying Christ’s experience as parallel with that of Israel. But again, Israel when they went into the land did not take all the land they were supposed to take.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they did not fight off all the giants.

Fr. Stephen: They did not get rid of the giant clans as they were supposed to. They didn’t do what they were supposed to, but Christ does. Jesus successfully does these things. And then even in St. Matthew’s gospel, another example, the way he frames the Sermon on the Mount and why it’s called that: he goes up on a mountain—which wouldn’t have been a mountain; it would have been a hill, based on where it is geographically—

Fr. Andrew: Well. That just proves it all took place in Lithuania, because the word for “mountain” and the word for “hill” is exactly the same word, kalnas. I’m just saying. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You’re going down this whole “Joseph Smith; Eden is in Jackson, Missouri” thing now.

Fr. Andrew: Well, you know, Vilnius used to be called the Jerusalem of the North.

Fr. Stephen: There you go.

Fr. Andrew: So I’m just putting that out there! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah… Okay.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, a little bit more of a hill than a mountain, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But it’s framed as a mountain. Why? Well, he’s teaching from a mountain.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like Moses.

Fr. Stephen: People gathered around him. Israel received the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in a real sense— And we’re going to keep talking about this, but in a real sense Jesus does what Israel was always supposed to do. Jesus succeeds where Israel… Because he is Israel in this sense.

Fr. Stephen: Right. He is embodying Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Christ is the ultimate triumph of Israel.

Fr. Stephen: And so this is also true if we look at the historical experience of Israel as it’s shown to us in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the Old Testament. We see that the experience of Israel was also profoundly an experience of suffering: suffering and slavery in Egypt, suffering at the hands of his brothers. We see this kind of literally with Joseph, but later on you have the Syro-Ephraimite War, you have these clashes between— You have the Israelite Civil War that’s related in the last few chapters of Judges. You have various persecutions of sort of the remnant; the faithful remnant of Israel gets persecuted by the faithless Israelites, like in the case of the Prophet Elijah. You also of course have— see Israel suffering at the hands of the foreign nations who attack, who invade, who harass, who try to conquer.

But the key here—because of course we see Christ’s experience also as one of profound suffering, of suffering, rejection, alienation, mocking, ultimately—well, several attempts at killing him before actually he gets betrayed and suffers and dies—is that the arc of the Hebrew Scriptures is about Israel suffering because of her sins. The reason the Israelite Civil War happens in Judges is because of the idolatry and immorality that Israel has fallen into, where they begin to turn on each other. The division of the kingdom into the northern and southern kingdom is a result of Solomon’s sin. When the Assyrians come and wipe out the northern kingdom of Israel, it’s for their apostasy and idolatry and sinfulness.

Fr. Andrew: It’s all very explicit in the Scriptures.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes! This is— Read the Old Testament stuff. This is not some deep exegetical legerdemain.

Fr. Andrew: This is not an interpretation that you have to apply. The Old Testament interprets this.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, this is just the narrative. When Babylon comes and conquers Judah and takes them into exile, it’s because of their sin. Again and again and again, Israel is suffering for her sins. The difference here is Jesus when he suffers, it’s not because of his sins because he doesn’t have any, and so he’s suffering for the people’s sins. He’s suffering for Israel’s sins. And this embodiment of Israel in this way, in these ways we’ve been talking about, is again part and parcel of why they look at Jesus and say, “This is the Messiah,” because he is Israel and so he’s Israel’s Messiah.

But this goes even deeper than that, and to kind of get at how deep it goes, or to go a little bit deeper down the rabbit-hole or however we want to frame it, we’re going to use— There are a lot of texts from the Old Testament we could read on this, but we’re going to read one in particular, in part because I just— It’s one I really like. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is a big favorite, a crowd favorite, I think.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t think Fr. Andrew is going to read it the Russian way, where he goes up a note every line, but— I mean, you’re free to do that if you want to, Fr. Andrew.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You can find that on YouTube. Not my voice, mind you. I actually think there’s one of Fr. Sergius Halvorsen doing this on the YouTubes somewhere, who was for one semester one of my homiletics professors when I was at St. Tikhon’s. He decided he’d had enough of St. Tikhon’s and went back to St. Vlad’s. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But so yours I think will be more in the style of “plain reading.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes, correct. There will be no singing tonight. Okay, so yeah this is Ezekiel 37: 1-14.

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley. It was full of bones. And he led me around among them. And behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley. And behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy over these bones and say to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you and cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you and you shall live and you shall know that I am the Lord.’ ”

So I prophesied as I was commanded, and as I prophesied there was a sound. And behold, a rattling. And the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold: there were sinews on them and flesh had come upon them and skin had covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath. Prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.’ ” So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.

Then he said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is lost. We are indeed cut off.’ Therefore, prophesy and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel, and you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the Lord. I have spoken and I will do it,’ declares the Lord.”

And pretty much every “Lord” there is actually “Yahweh.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “Then you will know that I am Yahweh.” And so this is— Ezekiel, of course, is a prophet during the exile. So at the time Ezekiel is exercising his prophetic ministry, the northern tribes of Israel are gone from the face of the earth: 150 years before this, wiped out by the Assyrians, never to come back, population distributed through the Assyrian Empire, through intermarriage, gone. At the time Ezekile is saying this, Judah is in exile in Babylon, but even when they’re allowed to eventually return under Cyrus, they’re still going to be under foreign domination. They’re going to return to become a province of the Persian Empire, which is then going to end up being a province of the Seleucid Empire, which is then going to end up briefly being an independent province and then once again right back to province of the Roman Empire. So they’re under foreign domination. So the Israel over which David was king, the paradigm for the Messiah— The Israel over which David was king is dead.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, long gone.

Fr. Stephen: The dream is dead. And there’s no sensible, visible, non-completely-miraculous way that it could come back and be restored, not in its fullness. There could be a remnant of it, but this is not going to actively come back again. So the imagery that God uses here of course is very pointed. It’s not “oh, it’s like you’re dead.” No. As Israel, Israel was dead. And the promise here as that Israel is going to rise again, rise from the dead. That this is going to require the miraculous power of God, obviously. God is the One who can do this. The fact that he has there “Then you will know that I am Yahweh. Then you will know that I am the One who causes things to be that weren’t”—Israel’s going to be remade. It has died and is going to rise again.

One of the sort of curious things that you find in the gospels and that you find in St. Paul’s epistles and in summary of some of the apostles’ preaching in Acts even in the New Testament are statements that Paul goes to a synagogue— St. Paul goes to a synagogue in the book of Acts, and he argues from the Scriptures that the Messiah must die and rise again. You may have noticed if you go back to that episode where we talked about the Messiah and Second Temple Judaism, that wasn’t on anybody’s list, really.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “I thought the Christ was supposed to, you know—”

Fr. Stephen: “—live forever!”

Fr. Andrew: “Live forever, right! What do you mean, he’s going to be lifted up? What do you mean, he’s going to be crucified? Wait a minute!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is— I mean, St. Paul confirms this. He says the message of the cross is a stumbling-block to the Jews. They’re like: “Oh, he’s the Messiah. Where is he now? Crucified by the Romans, huh? That’s not…” [Laughter] That’s how false messiahs died in the first century. They got crucified by the Romans.

So this was not on anybody’s list, and yet the apostles were making a case from the Hebrew Scriptures that the Hebrew Scriptures said that the Messiah would die and rise again. And I think this is the place where we find this. This is the way that we have to understand this, that Jesus as the Messiah embodies Israel. Israel died. Israel died because of her sins. Jesus dies with no sins, so he is able to die for her sins. And then when Jesus rises again as the Messiah, he’s the firstfruits; he’s the beginning of that promised resurrection and restoration.

So Jesus participates not only in the suffering that Israel historically suffered but also in the death of Israel, in order that the people of God could participate in the new life that comes in the resurrection. And just to head off—because I do not yet have that better class of critics that I crave—yes, there’s a lot more to say about Jesus’ death and resurrection. We’re not saying that’s all. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, of course. You know, it’s kind of sad to me— I mean, I get it. I get it, because I’ve felt this way at one point in my life, when I was a lot younger, frankly, that you see something really interesting, you want to understand what’s in the Scripture, you get an answer: “Okay, that’s it. I got it down now.” But if Orthodox Christianity is the truth, and I believe that it is uniquely the truth, then shouldn’t it be so full that you can never sort of master it? That you can never get it all down. Shouldn’t it be so full that it rises to the level of—and beyond—the level of human dignity in every possible way? That it’s a bottomless, bottomless well. Yeah. There’s so many things one can say about the death and resurrection of Jesus. I mean, even Pascha itself says so many of them but still just begins in some ways.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but this is one of them.

Fr. Andrew: This is one of them for sure.

Fr. Stephen: This is one of them that maybe we don’t emphasize enough. And yes, it’s true, and it’s not just— I mean, it’s theologically true. Any theological system that explains everything about God and that you can contain in your human head is wrong—and probably heretical, but at least wrong. [Laughter] But it’s not just true theologically; it’s true in the Scriptures. I say this as somebody who went and got a PhD in this. There is not a point that any human ever reaches where they can say they understand the Scriptures in a comprehensive way. It doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen. And that’s not just because of our nature as humans. So on one level, because of our nature as humans, as you just mentioned, you were a younger man once.

Fr. Andrew: “And I wore a younger man’s clothes…”

Fr. Stephen: I was always old. [Laughter] But the way in which a 21-year-old— well, a 15-year-old, a 21-year-old, a 30-year-old, a 45-year-old, and then moving on: a 60-year-old, a 75-year-old who spends time in the Scriptures hears the same Scriptures is very different. Not contradictory, and it’s not just like: “Oh, I understood it wrong before, and now I understand it correctly,” but God meets you through the Scriptures at different points in your life.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you’re able to absorb different things at different points, and often the stuff you absorb later builds on what you absorbed earlier.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and you’re different. The Scriptures are not a magic riddle box. They aren’t opaque. [Laughter] Some of them are difficult. I’m not saying that there aren’t difficult parts of the Scriptures, but, you know, a guy stuck in Tulsa—I don’t know why I’m picking on Tulsa, but a guy stuck in Tulsa overnight who flips open the Gideon bible in his hotel room because he can’t get to sleep and reads the parable of the good Samaritan can get the message that he needs to love his neighbor. That’s not like: “Oh no, I need to find some Church Father to explain this to me.” You can get it. But at the same time, someone who’s spent their whole life studying the Scriptures and is now in their 80s can pick up and read the parable of the good Samaritan and have it strike them in all new ways, and interact with their experiences in life in different ways, where they learn from it, too. That’s how Scripture works.

So in most cases— We’ll peel back a meta layer here on Lord of Spirits. Most of our episodes—I want to say all, but who knows, there could be one that’s different, but most of our episodes are essentially a trajectory, a line. We draw a line, a through-line through the Scriptures on some topic, and through Tradition on some topic. But if you think about a sphere, how many possible lines you could have go through that sphere, and none of those lines would be contradicting any of the other ones. Some of them would intersect with each other; some of them would run parallel to each other for a certain distance. But you can keep doing that forever.

What we’re doing tonight is three closely aligned trajectories that all have to do with what it means that Jesus is the Messiah, and this is the first one, this idea that Jesus embodies Israel and Israel’s experience and even the death and the resurrection of Israel, the restoration—the destruction and restoration of God’s people. And the people who traveled with him and ate with him and talked with him, even though they’re interacting with him as this human—that’s how they’re interacting with him; that’s how they first encountered him—they see this about him, and this is one of the things that causes them to conclude: This is the Messiah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, pretty cool. Well, we’ve still got two more halves to this episode, so we’re going to take our first break, and we’ll be right back with The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back, everybody. If you’re just joining us, we are talking about how it is that people who knew Jesus in person realized that he was the Messiah, not just that he had fulfilled a list of things that were prophesied about him in the Old Testament, although of course he did that and is doing that, but how they recognized him as the Messiah. In the first half, we talked about Jesus as embodying or recapitulating Israel and Israel’s story. So we’ve got two other ways that Jesus embodies elements of Israel, and we’re covering each one of those in these three halves. Pretty straightforward episode, I think.

Fr. Stephen: Way to recapitulate the first half.

Fr. Andrew: Right!?

Fr. Stephen: In just a few sentences.

Fr. Andrew: It’s funny to use both “embody” and “recapitulate,” because that’s head and body right there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: See, I didn’t have the etymology jingle going!

Fr. Stephen: Head and shoulders, knees and toes. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Well, there’s that great phrase— I can’t remember which work it’s in now, but there’s that great phrase from St. Augustine in Latin, “totus Christus caput et corpus; the whole Christ, head and body.” Of course, he’s— as far as I recall, he’s talking about the Church when he mentions the body there, but yeah, the whole Christ, head and body.

Fr. Stephen: I feel like we need more songs with hand motions.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true! I mean, yeah. Maybe this is something that the Orthodox Church could learn from Vacation Bible School.

Fr. Stephen: Oh no, I just meant in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, in the world in general!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Like, I think pop songs need to— Not dance crazes, like TikTok dances, I think that’s passé now, especially since TikTok lost all their music rights. [Laughter] Just hand motions.

Fr. Andrew: You are an award-winning ballroom dancer, though. I would love to see you start your own TikTok channel.

Fr. Stephen: I am. Well, you can’t use any music now.

Fr. Andrew: Mm. There’s probably some public domain…

Fr. Stephen: There is a lot of ballroom dancing music that is in the public domain. This is true.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Exactly! I’m sure there’s some Strauss or whatever that you could put on. This is what the people want, Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: I doubt it, somehow.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Think of the merch!

Fr. Stephen: Enh… I’m not big on the selling the merch.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know, I know. All right. What are we doing in this half?

Fr. Stephen: What are we doing in general!

Fr. Andrew: What are we doing?

Fr. Stephen: And how have we come to this? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Who am I? What am I doing? Sitting here at work: What am I doing anyway?

Fr. Stephen: Existential crisis in the middle of an episode.

Fr. Andrew: Well, it is about time. We are in our late 40s, so we should be having some existential crises, right?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah. So this is— There’s a whole bunch of things that I can’t do because it would be a mid-life crisis.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It would be a little too cliché.

Fr. Stephen: Right. I don’t know if I’ve talked about this. Like, I have this firm rule that if you don’t have any tattoos by the time you’re 40, you cannot get any tattoos.

Fr. Andrew: Fair.

Fr. Stephen: If you have gotten tattoos before you’re 40, you can keep getting tattoos your whole life, but if you hit 40s with zero tattoos and then you start getting tattoos, it’s a mid-life crisis and it’s just kind of sad and people look at you kind of funny.

Fr. Andrew: Nodding knowingly. See, because this is radio, so they can’t see me doing that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So I think this is— There are a number of things, like you can’t buy a sports car after a certain age if you’re a dude. Women have to be careful with their hairstyles once they reach a certain age. You don’t want to get the mid-life crisis thing going. Middle age is the worst of all possible worlds. You can’t get up off the floor; you don’t get senior discounts.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Anyway. Okay, now that we’re done commiserating…

Fr. Andrew: All right. Welcome back, kids.

Fr. Stephen: Back to the show, yes, whipper-snappers. Get off of my lawn! We’re going to be talking about— Here in the second half, we’re going to be talking about the way in which Jesus as the Messiah embodies the Torah. That may already sound crazy to some people, and I say: good.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes. “And I say to you: good.”

Fr. Stephen: So again here, like in the first half, we have to go back and revisit a couple of concepts; not full-on review, but revisit a couple of concepts. And that’s— We’re using the term “torah” very deliberately here rather than other possibilities, in part to try to break up connotations. We’ve talked before on the show how the word torah in Hebrew means something like “teaching,” and that got translated in the third century in the Septuagint, which is a translation of the Torah, as nomos.

Fr. Andrew: Third century BC, by the way, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, third century BC. Nomos. See, my interest extends not that far into AD, so I just assumed.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, nomos meaning kind of “way.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, nomos kind of was an idea that included a whole way of life. A lot of things that we would file under culture, manner, mores, a whole sort of way of life, a way of being in the world; it was a very sort of rich term.

Fr. Andrew: “That’s their way.”

Fr. Stephen: And then when St. Jerome chose lex to translate that, lex in Latin had a richer meaning, closer to nomos, but ended up coming into English as “law.” And then the term “law” even got kind of devalued in English to the point that now when we hear the word “law,” even when it’s used in the New Testament, we think of commandments, like laws.

Fr. Andrew: Or legal codes.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And it’s very obvious that the Torah includes, for example, the book of Genesis, which doesn’t include any of that, and the narrative portions of Exodus, and the narrative portions of the other books of the Torah. So we’re using “torah” here because what we’re talking about is more than just rules. That immediately becomes important—that idea that it’s not just rules, commandments, laws—when we talk about what it means to fulfill the Torah. And we’ve talked about in the past that the way a lot of people use “fulfill the law” or interpret “fulfill the law” when it occurs in the New Testament is basically “get rid of.” So it’s used as this weird sort of linguistic legerdemain where Christ says he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, so someone’ll say, “Oh, see, so we don’t follow this, that, and the other from the Torah any more.” You say to them, “But Christ didn’t come to abolish the law.” They’re like: “No! He fulfilled it, and the result is the same: we can ignore it now.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “We’re using the word ‘fulfill,’ but we mean ‘abolish.’ ”

Fr. Stephen: It sounds nicer. “Yeah, it sounds nicer, so it’s just sort of this trick.” No, no, no, no. “We’re not firing you; we’re letting you go.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: “Good luck in your future…”

Fr. Andrew: “Laid off.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And, relatedly, then, some people will interpret this and say, well, “Jesus fulfills the law” to mean he kept the rules; he didn’t break any of the rules—which, okay, true, Jesus did keep the commandments, all of them, but that’s a very base level of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about him fulfilling the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Torah is way bigger than the commandments.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so the actual meaning of the word “fulfill,” as we’ve said before, is sort of right there in it, and that it needs to be filled full, filled up to overflowing.

Fr. Andrew: And I should say, by the way, that if you understand this correctly, then you can start to see why it is, for instance, that there are a number of commandments even and ordinances and specific things that God tells Israel to do in the Torah that are said in the text itself to be forever: “This shall be an ordinance forever.” And you’ll be like: “Well, wait a minute. Nobody’s doing that any more. In what sense is that forever? Like, Christians don’t do that; even modern Rabbinic Jews don’t do that thing, whatever it might be, especially some of the sacrificial stuff.” But if you understand how Jesus is the One who embodies and fulfills the Torah, then you start to see why it’s forever.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so that’s part of explaining what that means, because that’s a question I at least get a lot. “Okay, so ‘fulfill’ means fills up to overflowing. How does Jesus fill the Torah up to overflowing? What does that actually mean?” So that’s part of what we’re going to be getting at here in this half.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: What we have presented in the Torah, in the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, is a way of life, a way of being in the world. That’s why nomos was a good translation. So that takes different forms. In Genesis and the other narrative material where we’re talking about the lives of people, we’re seeing a way of life described narratively, and that’s described both positively and negatively. So there are positive descriptions of things that conform to that way of life, like Isaac and Rebecca’s marriage. There are also descriptions of things that deviate from that way of life, like various incidents of polygamy, and you see in those narratives how that goes wrong, how that goes badly, the fruits and the results that that produces. Both of those are ways of using narrative to describe a correct way of life. You have on the one hand exemplars, you have models to follow; on the other hand you have cautionary tales: this is what happens when you go the other way.

And it should go without saying, and I’m sure we’ve said this on the show before, but a lot of people have problems with this. A lot of our atheist friends have problems with this. Just because the Bible describes something happen, that doesn’t mean the Bible is saying that it’s good.

Fr. Andrew: I know, and you can tell the people who are trying to make that claim when they talk about, for instance, “biblical marriage.” That’s often the thing they’ll throw out. “Oh, this’ll get— You want to talk about biblical marriage? Well, look at all these marriages in the Old Testament!”

Fr. Stephen: “Polygamy!”

Fr. Andrew: God didn’t say to do that! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And in fact, if you read the narrative, it goes horribly wrong.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! It’s not going to work out well for you.

Fr. Stephen: Deuteronomy says the king should not multiply wives. David then has a whole bunch of wives. Look what happens in David’s family. Again, all you have to do is read it on the surface. David says, “All of this stuff that’s happening in my family is because of my sin.” David says that, in the text of Scripture. Not even any deep level of interpretation. So, yeah. Both of these occur. When you read about what happens with Jacob’s family because of being married to Leah and Rachel and having children with two of his servants, and everything that unfolds, you see: “Oh. Polygamy is bad.” This is what any sensible person would conclude.

But so: this way of life. And we see— Usually it’s in the life of the same person, like in the patriarchal narratives you see where Abraham does right and where Abraham goes wrong. We see both, and we see Abraham grow through those experiences and grow closer to God by following a way of life.

Commandments obviously fit into that in a very obvious way, so commandments, mitzvot in Hebrew, give you the fences. If we’re talking about a way of life, a way, we’re talking about a road, a road you’re going to travel down. One road as opposed to another road. And this is the good road that leads to the place you want to go. One of the ways that you’re kept on the road is if there are established fences. Without fences, without any kind of barriers or markers at the edges of the road, you might have a muddy track and you can’t tell: Is the road continuing this way or that way? You might get lost; you might wander off the road. If you have these clear markers of where the edges of the road are, that won’t happen. They help keep you on the road. That’s how the commandments function. They’re the borders; they’re the edges that you don’t want to wander past.

This is really the same way that theological dogma works in the Orthodox Church, by the way. The word dogma in Greek refers to a boundary marker for somebody’s property. The statements of the Ecumenical Councils are putting in these fences, these markers of the edges: You don’t want to go further than this in this direction, or further than that in that direction. You want to stay within these boundaries that mark off the way of salvation. But this is built on how the Torah structures it.

Within those—whether it’s commandments, whether it’s narrative elements, whatever genre we’re talking about—what’s really being laid out is a way of understanding the world, a way of seeing the world, a way of reasoning about the world. That obviously includes ethical or moral reasoning: What should I do in this situation? What is the right thing to me? What is the thing to do in this situation that will please God, that will bring me closer to God? But it includes a lot more. How do we see other people? How do we see events in the world? How do we understand things that happen to us and that we encounter in our lives. It is this overarching framework of how to see the world, interact with the world, be in the world, travel through the world toward God.

When we talk about Jesus embodying that, hopefully that idea starts to make a lot more sense. That when his disciples—when other people—encountered Jesus during his ministry, they see that he embodies that way of life, that he embodies that way of seeing the world, that way of seeing others, that way of communicating, that way of teaching. An awful lot of the gospels is Jesus teaching. I know there’s people out there like: “Yeah…?” [Laughter] But this is counter-intuitive from a lot of theological perspectives. I’ll give an example. Back during the last quest for the historical Jesus—may it rest in peace and never come back—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, is that still a thing?

Fr. Stephen: No! The third quest for the historical Jesus is now over; we don’t need a fourth. Enough of this.

Fr. Andrew: Someone on this has finally dropped the Ring into Mount Doom. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So that’s over, but: rest in pieces. But during that, when you would read these books, as was my wont, didn’t matter who it was of those groups—didn’t matter if it was Crossan or Robert Funk or Marcus Borg, any of these guys; Bart Ehrman’s brief dalliance with it before he moved on to other things; even N.T. Wright stuff, which is much better than most of that other stuff I just named; any of that stuff—something almost all of them would say, interestingly, was, “The gospels are basically extended introductions to the Passion narratives.”

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: And they would say, “In any given gospel, about one-third of it is Passion narrative.” Now, that’s less than the majority, allow me to point out. But, coming from a particular theological perspective, which predominates in western European countries—people get mad now when we talk about Western things in the West, but it predominates in west European countries and their former colonies—that’s the important part. Jesus dying and rising again, that’s the important part. And, yeah, we read about his birth at Christmas, and there’s this other stuff in between.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, this is— [Laughter] This is the world for people for whom the only feasts on the church calendar are Christmas and Easter.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But so this really important part is the death and resurrection of Christ, and that stuff before that is just building up for that. It’s like Jesus predicting that and, you know, that kind of thing.

And then there are all kinds of variants of this. So you’ve got certain types of dispensationalism that say all that teaching of Jesus isn’t for Christians.

Fr. Andrew: Oh yeah! I’ve heard about that. I’ve been like: What? What!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So that’s not even for Christians, so you can just go straight for death and resurrection, because that is for us, etc., etc. There’s various versions of this, but that’s sort of the main event, and this other stuff is sort of… And, you know, you’ve got certain species of Protestantism where, you know, we don’t want to look at that stuff Jesus is teaching too much because it might start looking like works righteousness. He’s telling you to do good things and not do bad things, and, you know, that’s the worst thing you can do as a Christian. [Laughter]

So yeah, there’s all kinds of reasons why it gets sidelined, but—it’s mostof the gospels!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah. How about: It’s all important.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And if you’re on any kind of lectionary—I’m not just talking about the Orthodox lectionary, now. Orthodox lectionary, Roman Catholic lectionary, Protestant lectionaries: How much of the year are you reading from Jesus’ teaching and how much of the year are you reading about his death and resurrection?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So this is in the structure of the Church’s worship, too, the importance of this material, of Jesus’ teaching. Now that I’ve gone there, let me push a little further. Jesus is teaching Torah the whole time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, in most ways there’s not really any new material there exactly, which is probably why so many people called him Rabbi.

Fr. Stephen: So the first people who identified him as the Messiah were the people who heard him teaching, and heard him teaching Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they didn’t say, “Look! Watch him fulfilling prophecies!” No, it’s: these are the things he says. “No man ever spoke like this Man.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. He’s going in. He’s answering questions. And he’s doing these things, and he’s arguing with— When he’s arguing with the Pharisees, he’s arguing Torah with them. They come and say, “Why are you healing this person on the Sabbath?” And he says to them, “On the Sabbath, if your donkey falls in a ditch, you pull it out of the ditch. This is a human.” He’s arguing from the Torah! And again and again he says to them, “You guys claim to be the ones who know Torah. You’re the teachers of the law; you’re the teachers of Torah. You guys are the ones going out teaching Torah, but you’re not doing it. You’re not living it. You don’t really understand it. You don’t know how to apply it to people’s lives who come to you.”

And what everyone observes about Jesus is the opposite, that he’s living it out, that he’s explaining it, that he’s teaching it. He’s explaining these things. And this is not— So there’s this weird idea that— Well, there’s a couple related. One of them is that Jesus somehow makes the Torah more difficult, like he heightens the Torah. When he says, “When it says, ‘Thou shalt not murder,’ but if you hate your brother, you’ve already murdered him in your heart,” that somehow before Jesus said that it was okay to hate your brother in your heart as long as you didn’t kill him? That’s a really weird way of reading the commandments, man. [Laughter] I’m pretty sure nobody— no Jewish teacher before Jesus would have told you it’s okay to hate your brother and wish him dead as long as you don’t—

Fr. Andrew: Just don’t touch him.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, just don’t actually kill him, but otherwise it’s fine.

Fr. Andrew: Or the other one, basically if you see a woman and lust after her in your heart, it’s the same basically as if you committed adultery. It’s not like in the Torah “look but don’t touch” was the rule.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. In fact, you remember that whole “don’t covet your neighbor’s wife” thing?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I’ve heard of that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! That’s in there! The same place as the “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” in fact. Just a couple verses later. Yeah. So Christ is, again, not making it more difficult; he’s applying it correctly. He’s talking about what it actually means. Because all that stuff— I once had somebody—I will not name them; this is an Orthodox person; this is a member of the Orthodox clergy—say to me, “We don’t follow the Torah any more. We follow the commandments of Jesus, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.” To which I responded, “Those are from Deuteronomy and Leviticus.” [Laughter] Those are literally commandments from the Torah.

If you notice the reaction— We need to watch the reaction as Jesus is teaching. When Jesus says these things about the Torah, the people look at him and say, “This must be the Messiah,” because of how he understands and teaches the Torah. And his enemies, the ones who don’t like him and who don’t think he’s the Messiah, what happens? They’re put to shame, because they can’t argue with him, because he understands the Torah better than they do. It has something to do with him giving it, but we’ll get there. [Laughter]

He understands it better than they do. That’s what’s going on in all these teaching sections of the gospels. And it’s going on right there on the surface. It doesn’t just— This embodying of the Torah doesn’t just include—it does include, but it isn’t just about his teaching—Christ obviously also lives that way of life as well.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. He walks the walk. We’ll get more to that in a minute.

Fr. Stephen: So, yes, Jesus does all the things that are commanded in the Torah; he doesn’t do the things that are forbidden in the Torah. But you look at his criticism of the Pharisees: every time he criticizes the Pharisees, he doesn’t criticize them for being wrong. He doesn’t say, “Oh no, you’ve got this wrong.” He calls them hypocrites.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Let me argue with you.” Yeah, hypocrites. “Yeah, no, you say the right things, but you’re not living it, buddy.”

Fr. Stephen: “You’re not living it.” That’s always the criticism, that Jesus is saying understanding the Torah, understanding what God is teaching means living this out, not just memorizing it, not just being able to make convoluted arguments about it and win arguments about it.

Fr. Andrew: Such about “owning” the Sadducees on Twitter?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. There’s something to say about this in terms of Christian theology, including Orthodox theology. [Laughter] It’s not just about memorizing canons and stuff from Church councils and where to put the right preposition in your Christological statement so you’re not a heretic and then going out to “own” other people and win arguments. That’s not how theology works. You’re supposed to live it out. You’re supposed to live it out, and when you’re actually living it out the way the saints do— That’s why they’re saints. They’re saints because of how they lived their lives. Some of them are not formally educated, but they lived it out, and because they lived it out, they understood it and could explain it. It doesn’t work the other way.

Now, all this that I’ve been saying— This episode is going to be great because I’m anticipating being called both a Judaizer and an anti-Semite after this. [Laughter] By some of the same people! But this isn’t just me going on this wacky Hebrophile tack. This is— We’ve fairly recently, at least as we’re doing this live broadcast, celebrated a couple of feasts in the life of the Orthodox Church: the feast of Christ’s Circumcision and most recently Christ’s Presentation in the Temple or the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple, when he was brought 40 days after his birth to the Temple. And if you read any of the hymnography, any of the readings we’ve been reading, from the Orthodox menaia, it’s all about Christ keeping the Torah. It’s all about Jesus keeping the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: It’s all over the texts. It’s everywhere.

Fr. Stephen: The whole point of these feasts is to make this point to us, that Jesus is the One who embodies the Torah in this way. So this is not just something that’s some weird thing of mine.

So this carries over. I’ll go so far as to say this is where most modern people fail to understand St. Paul when he talks about how to live. Now that part of St. Paul gets marginalized anyway in our modern world. There’s this whole section of every one of his epistles—it usually follows him saying the word “therefore”—where he starts talking to people about how to live, and those parts get a lot less emphasis. Like, after Romans 11, a lot of people just sort of check out. But for him, this is where he’s going with the whole letter. He structures it based on this, based on the way in which Jesus embodied the Torah. This is how he understands the Torah relating to the Christian life.

For St. Paul, there’s two ways you can walk, and that “walk” language is important because in Jewish circles already in the first century AD when a Pharisee like St. Paul is discussing the way people should live or answering questions as a teacher on the way we should live—as he does in his epistles all the time: “here’s what you should do; you should be doing this and not doing that”—that whole area of discussion within Judaism was already called halakha.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, as I just learned— I mean, I knew the word. I knew it was about applying the Torah, but it means to walk. It means to walk.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it’s from the verb “to walk,” the way you walk in. St. Paul’s epistles are written in Greek, so when we see the word “to walk,” we don’t necessarily— We just think of it as a metaphor or something, and we don’t make this connection. But for him, there are two different ways. This is picking up on things in Proverbs: there’s the way of wisdom, the way of foolishness; the way of life, the way of destruction. But for St. Paul, there’s two ways. You can walk according to the Spirit and follow the Spirit, meaning capital-S Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God; or you can walk according to the flesh. And if you walk according to the flesh, what that means is that you are living your life in a way where you’re seeking to gratify your desires: lust, gluttony, greed, pride, you name it. That’s what you’re seeking to gratify. If you’re walking according to the Spirit—the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God—then you’re living your life in a way that seeks to please God.

But what we see again and again St. Paul explicitly saying is he’s teaching walking in the way of the Spirit as a positive way of living and saying that if you live in this way and you follow the Spirit, then those guard rails from the commandments—it’s not that they’re not there any more, but it’s that you won’t need them; you will stay on the path. You’re not going to be bouncing off of them. So he lists the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. And he says, “Against such things there is no law.” There’s no commandment in the Torah that you will violate if your life is filled with those things.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because if you become the kind of person that that Torah is trying to get you to be, then you don’t actually then have to keep around a rule book with you: “Oh, wait, I’ve got to make sure: Don’t kill my— Don’t commit murder.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, got to remember every day not to commit murder.

Fr. Andrew: “Don’t commit any murders…” No, you don’t have to think— Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: If you love your brother, you’re not going to think about killing him. [Laughter] Right. In Romans, St. Paul says that they need to “learn to love your neighbor,” he says, “because the one who loves keeps the whole Torah.” If you truly love your neighbor and love God, not “oh, that’s it, you’ve kept the whole Torah—boom!” [Laughter] But you will not violate it. You will not violate it.

Fr. Andrew: And one could ask, then, “Well, what’s the point of the Torah, then, anyway? I’m a loving person. Why do I need all that?” Well, it’s because, number one, let’s be honest with ourselves: in many ways we are not loving persons. Right?

Fr. Stephen: Speak for yourself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. [Laughter] I am speaking for myself! But I know you a little bit, too… [Laughter] Fair enough.

Fr. Stephen: I am a delight. But anyway…

Fr. Andrew: But I think a simile that works here is being a musician. Kids, when you’re first taking those piano lessons or you’re getting out that clarinet for the first time or whatever it might be, you have to look at the keys and say, “Okay, when I press this one, it’s A; when I press this one, it’s B. C#, whatever. These together is this chord…” So it’s very— You’re thinking about all of it as you go. You’re thinking about the structure, you’re thinking about the names of everything, you’re thinking about the rules, how this does work, what exactly is a key change, all this stuff.

But if you were to go up to Miles Davis right after he played some piece of jazz and say, “Okay, now, what exactly were you doing just now?” He probably would not have explained it in terms of all the stuff that I just said, because he mastered that a long, long time ago. He just gets up there and he plays, and what comes out is music.

In a very real sense, that’s how the Torah works, is it functions as, as St. Paul puts it, a tutor. It’s a teacher. It teaches you how to put all these things together, and then you become the person who can simply do that, and you don’t have to be looking up the rules all the time. But until we’re really able to play, so to speak, then we do need to have the rules. If you make a mistake when you’re playing a particular piece of music, you go back and you look at the sheet music, and you say, “Where exactly did I go wrong? How did I fail here?” So even if you do become a decent musician, you still need to be drilled with the rules every so often so that you can gain greater perfection.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is how this connects to the idea of having the mind of Christ, to see the world in this way. Ultimately, what St. Paul argues is that in the way that Jesus as the Messiah embodied the Torah, that because we have the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God dwelling in us, we can now, if we follow the Spirit, live similarly. It’s not “imitate Christ” in a wooden sense; it [isn’t] in an external sense. It is that we will naturally begin to learn to live that way.

The problem with trying to keep the Torah in his past that St. Paul identifies is that he was trying to keep it externally. He was trying to keep it as rules, just checking off the rules, and again and again he failed because of sin. It wasn’t a problem with the Torah; it was a problem with him. But that the Holy Spirit now dwelling within him would allow him to keep the Torah. And if you have any doubts about how I’m reading St. Paul here, I urge you to read St. John Chrysostom’s commentary on Romans where he says the same thing. That’s as much as I’m allowed to quote Church Fathers in an episode of Lord of Spirits, though. [Laughter] So I will let it go.

Fr. Andrew: All the new kids are not going to get these jokes, you know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I also want to add, because we kind of glossed over it, we have a very weird mental image of Jesus a lot of the time, because we’ve gotten it from a lot of, frankly—I’ll speak for myself, growing up in the United States—bad Protestant art and movies about Jesus.

Fr. Andrew: Man, are you dissing the flannelgraph?

Fr. Stephen: No, not the flannelgraph. I’m talking about the illustrations in those Bible storybooks and stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. He’s always got like a white one-piece tunic and then a red sash. What is that always about? I don’t know…

Fr. Stephen: But for the record, when we say Jesus kept the commandments, those were the commandments about dress, too, and about what he ate. Jesus was Jewish. Sorry to break it to you, Greeks. He dressed as a Jewish man was supposed to. He presented himself as a Jewish man was supposed to. He ate as the Torah said one should eat. He kept the whole Torah. When he, for example, criticizes the Pharisees for their tassels, he doesn’t criticize them for wearing tassels at the edge of their garments—they were supposed to do that in the Torah. He criticized them for making the tassels long and the phylacteries broad and big, meaning doing it in a way that was clearly intended to draw other people’s attention and to make you look pious to other people; that’s what he criticized, because that was a hypocritical way of keeping Torah. That’s not why God gave the Torah, so that you could make yourself look really pious to other people and become proud. But, yeah, keep that in mind. Does your mental image of Jesus look remotely Jewish? If not, it probably needs some correction.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. The point of all of this is— And we talked about this a little bit— I should say extensively, actually, in the “But We Have the Mind of Christ” episode. And that is to gain this sense of understanding, interpreting, applying the Torah the way that Christ himself does, and as we have said in this half, as he embodies. He is in a sense the living Torah.

All right. Well, we’re going to take our second and final break, and we’ll be right back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody. That Lampstand Institute thing is actually supposed to be really cool.

Fr. Stephen: I’m offended.

Fr. Andrew: Are you?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Why can’t I learn digital media skills?

Fr. Andrew: You’re too old, man!

Fr. Stephen: It’s ageism!

Fr. Andrew: Yep. Old dog, new tricks: not a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Doh! Anybody who’s heard any of my podcasts knows that I need to learn podcasting skills.

Fr. Andrew: Look, you come up here, I’ll show you a couple of things, okay?

Fr. Stephen: Neh. You’re old, too.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know. But, see, unlike you I didn’t get this in as my midlife crisis.

Fr. Stephen: I need the Zoomers to show me how to use the computers. That’s what I need. [Laughter] They don’t want to, but…

Fr. Andrew: Yes. It can happen for you, man. Well, welcome back. We’re talking about how it is that people who met Jesus—how did they identify him as the Messiah, even though they weren’t sitting there with a whole list of things from the Old Testament, saying, “Aha! Aha! He did this! He fulfilled that!” How did they recognize him in their direct encounter with him as the Messiah? And in the first half we talked about Christ as embodying Israel, embodying Israel’s story; the second as Christ embodying the Torah. And what’s this one about, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: This is about the way in which Jesus as the Messiah embodies Israel’s God.

Fr. Andrew: There we go.

Fr. Stephen: Again, to clarify, what we’re going to be talking about here is— We’ve done a lot about Christology, obviously, in various episodes about this show. We had the whole series on Christ in the Old Testament. We have talked about, recently, Christ as the divine Logos and Wisdom in Proverbs. All of those are approaching Christology basically sort of top-down, so we’re talking about the divine Person who then is made flesh, and that fact. So we’re to be talking in a sense about Christology now, in the way that Jesus as the Messiah embodies the God of Israel, but we’re going to be coming at it from the opposite side.

When the disciples first encountered Jesus, when the people whom Jesus preached to first encountered him, the people of Jerusalem first saw him and heard him and encountered him, they encountered him as human. That was their immediate experience.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, he was, frankly, not walking around transfigured with the uncreated light most of the time.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That happened once briefly in front of three disciples. The rest of the time, as people interacted with him, they were interacting with him as a human. Nevertheless, they—some of them—came to the conclusion that this person, Jesus, whom we’ve met, whom we’ve eaten meals with, whom we’ve sat with, whom we’ve slept next to while we were traveling overnight, embodies the God of Israel in a unique way. This theologically has to do with Christ’s humanity as the veil. When we say that, some people are thinking, “Oh, veil, like it’s hidden, like Christ’s humanity hides who he really is.” That’s not what we’re saying, because Christ’s humanity is also who he really is.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. [Laughter] That’s right.

Fr. Stephen: But it is the veil in the sense of the veil that separated the holy of holies from the holy place.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that wasn’t there to keep people from looking inside.

Fr. Stephen: That was there to keep people from dying.

Fr. Andrew: Right. They wouldn’t experience that whole “death by holiness” thing by entering into the presence of God in an unworthy manner.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so there is a day when God will reveal himself and visit his people, and that’s called the day of the Lord; that’s judgment day.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that is coming.

Fr. Stephen: It’s coming.

Fr. Andrew: It’s interesting to think about because sometimes people will say, “Well, why doesn’t God just reveal himself to me? Why doesn’t he just reveal himself to the world? What’s with all the hiding?”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So you don’t die.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! It’s so you don’t die! I mean, I get the question. I get it. I get it. Seeing is believing and all that. But it really is because we would suffer the consequences. You become responsible for whatever you receive. So God’s hiddenness is actually a mercy, and it’s his patience so that we have time to repent. So that’s what the veil is about.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so Christ’s humanity is serving as this veil in that kind of protective way, but it doesn’t stop people—it doesn’t stop faithful people, people who are paying attention, people who are listening to Christ—from realizing that he is embodying the God of Israel. So what do we mean by that, other than just an ontological question? Okay, yeah, Jesus is God. Well, that’s not just what we’re saying, because we’re being more particular than that. He embodies the God of Israel, the God whom we see in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the Old Testament: a particular God. There’s not a lot of value in generic god. There’s zero value in Plato’s god.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] By definition! He just contemplates himself.

Fr. Stephen: If there was, for example, some guy who called himself a Christian apologist on the West Coast who was heretical on every single topic of doctrine—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter, clapping]

Fr. Stephen: —and spent most of his time just trying to argue with atheists that some kind of god exists, that would be of no value. Hypothetically.

Fr. Andrew: Whoo. Shade thrown three times… Well, it’s two times against the West for you. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So we are talking about the true and living God, a very particular God, the real God, who is embodied by Jesus as the Messiah. And so what are some of the elements that characterize the God we see in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the Old Testament, that we also see in Jesus? Because Hebrews will say Jesus is the express image of his character. This is it. So what is that character?

One of the first elements that’s present all through the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament is the humility of God, which is a strange phrase, probably, to most people, especially our Calvinist friends who believe that what God is all about is glorifying himself. But in actuality we see over and over again in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament the humility of God. We see that over against other gods. When you compare him with— The gods of the nations are always proclaiming their own— are always glorifying themselves, are always proclaiming how great and how powerful and wonderful they are, sometimes to comedic effect, now that no one is worshiping them any more when we find the old tablets. There’s sort of an Ozymandias thing going on with some of them.

But what do we see with the God of Israel, with the true God? He will, for example, identify himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We hear that all the time; we’re used to hearing that. God is the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob. And we don’t think every time God says that to identify himself, he’s saying, “I am the God of three generations of nomadic Bedouins.” That’s not that big of a brag.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not super impressive in the ancient world. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Compared to the gods of Egypt, the gods of the Babylonian Empire, the gods of— right? Three generations of nomadic Bedouins. This is what we’re getting at when we talk about the humility of God: the way that God comes down to meet humanity and thereby elevates humanity, particular human persons. God identifies himself as the protector of orphans and widows and the poor, all these people who have no rights and have no one to stand up for them. God sends Moses and Aaron to Pharaoh, and he identifies himself as the God of the Hebrews. Pharaoh picks up on this fairly quickly and is like: “Oh, the god of a bunch of slaves.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the god of losers is basically the way that he takes it.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes! He’s like: “Well, whoever your god is, since I’ve enslaved you, mine must be better.” And in Pharaoh’s case, you know, he thought he was one himself. Like, this is not normal in the ancient world, for a god—let alone the Most High God, the God who created everything—to choose to identify himself, and whom he would identify himself with.

And we have to be honest, even when he’s the God of Israel or the God of Judah, we have been brought up, culturally, even if we weren’t brought up in a Christian environment per se or a Jewish environment per se, we’re brought up in a culture that’s deeply informed by the Bible, and so we have this greatly out-sized sense of how important Israel as a kingdom was, because it’s so central to the Old Testament, to the Hebrew Scriptures. But if we’re just going by “objective” geopolitics, material-level archaeology, then we’re talking about a kingdom that existed as a united kingdom for, like, a hundred years in world history.

Fr. Andrew: Right, like, it’s not one of the great empires of old. It was regional, a little bit more than tribes, but…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. After that hundred years, it broke in two. One half of it lasted another 175 years and then was gone, never to return. That was the one named Israel, by the way. So there was a nation in the world called Israel, before 1948, for about 275 years, in all of human history.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and they didn’t conquer that much territory, you know.

Fr. Stephen: Judah gets 135 more years than that, so they get about 400.

Fr. Andrew: Well, they get some territory, but, you know, this is not some big empire or whatever. As far as world history is concerned, Israel is not a big deal in the ancient world.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. I dare say, and as much as this may annoy our Jewish friends, if it weren’t for Christianity, it would be a footnote. If it weren’t for Christianity incorporating the Hebrew Scriptures into Christianity’s Bible and then Christianity spreading through the whole world, you would know about as much about ancient Israel/Judah as you know about the Hittites or the Luwians.

Fr. Andrew: Tough but fair.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So geopolitically on the stage of the world, insignificant nation. God nonetheless identifies himself as the God of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: It would be like— Just to give you some sense of what this might be like, everybody, and I’m not throwing shade on what in this podcast has been referred to in the past as “the poor man’s Ohio,” but it would be like saying, “It’s the god of Indiana.” I mean, I love Indiana and whatever, but no one’s saying, “Oh, Indiana, that’s a very threatening place. They’re going to take over Illinois.” It’s not… It’s not! We love you, Indiana, but—

Fr. Stephen: Or—get ready for shots fired—it’s like the god of Lithuania.

Fr. Andrew: What! [Laughter, clapping]

Fr. Stephen: Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Or the god of the Netherlands: very tall but very dim.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, very tall and very blond, but other than that…

Fr. Andrew: Blond and blunt.

Fr. Stephen: Probably handsome, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But this is the God whom we meet in the Hebrew Scriptures, a God who has— who created everything: created every human, created every nation, but chooses to identify himself with the weak, the powerless, with Bedouins, with short-lived kingdoms, out of his love and out of his humility.

Of course, we see this reflected in the life of Jesus right from the beginning. You have the circumstances of his birth, both in the sense of being born in a cave that was used as a stable and being set in an animal food trough for a crib, and living in dirt poverty in Nazareth. His father was basically a day-laborer— St. Joseph was a day-laborer who did fix-it jobs for other peasants who were poor to pay him. But also there are clear indications in the gospels—this isn’t just something that comes later in Talmudic Judaism or something—that there were people at the time who made accusations about the circumstances of his birth. These people who didn’t believe Jesus was the Messiah did not believe in the virgin birth, folks. They thought there was something fishy, and you get things like, in St. John’s gospel, a bunch of Jewish people who are arguing with him, just saying to Jesus, “We know who our father is.” That’s not coincidental. God forgive them for that blasphemy, but Jesus was not born the son of Herod or the son of the emperor. He was not…

And the poverty isn’t just something in terms of his birth and early life. He never owned a place to live. He never owned more than the clothes on his back. He traveled from place to place, homeless. He would either— Someone would either offer him hospitality or he and the disciples would sleep outside when they journeyed around. That’s why we see them, over in the gospels, sleeping on boats, on fishing boats, just wherever they were, not settled in one place.

And then ultimately, the ultimate display of Christ’s humility is submitting himself to suffering and death, and a particularly—not just painful but shameful and humiliating death. So the humility that’s seen in the life of Jesus is the perfect reflection of the humility of God, of the God of Israel, that we see in the Hebrew Scriptures.

This embodying of the God of Israel also ties into what we were talking about in the second half. Not just that Jesus embodies the Torah, but Jesus also teaches it; he is the giver of it. The way that he gives it, the way that he teaches it, the centrality of love in his teaching and his message—which, by the way, is also the central theme of the book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Torah, of the Pentateuch—follows this pattern of God who gave it in the first place.

And it’s very important that another way in which, related to the Torah, Jesus embodies the God of Israel is that, just like at Mount Sinai when the Torah was given through Moses, Moses comes down, reads the book of the covenant to the people, and the people say, “Oh, yeah, all that you’ve said, we’re going to do that,” and then they do none of that, in the same way, Christ comes and lives out and expresses and teaches the Torah and communicates this way of life to people—and they reject it. This is— The whole arc of the Hebrew Scriptures, from the narrative portions that show it to the prophets who explain it this way is God coming, condescending in his humility to love Israel, and Israel rejecting him. And God being faithful to Israel, and Israel being faithless. That’s the whole story. That’s the story of the Hebrew Scriptures. This is not me insulting Jewish people; this is their Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, they know full well.

Fr. Stephen: This is the arc of the Hebrew Scriptures, and we see that arc in the life of Jesus. We see that arc in the life of Jesus: he came to his own, and his own received him not. He comes to his people, and they reject him. This way in which the blessings of God get repaid with [faithlessness] and betrayal in the Old Testament, and the teaching and the miracles done by Christ get repaid with rejection and attack and suffering in the life of Jesus as the Messiah: this becomes the subject of meditation in a lot of our Holy Week texts. A lot of our Holy Week hymnology is meditating on how this relationship between Jesus and his people mirrors, parallels, embodies the relationship between God and his people. And so we’ve got examples.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, indeed. Yes, in Holy Week there are, well, a lot of hymns, but we’re going to read one of them from—

Fr. Stephen: More than three!

Fr. Andrew: Yes, more than three. How about that? Yes. Just go to church a lot during Holy Week, people. Just go to church. Just take the week off and go to everything. It’s the only way to live. Anyway, the service of Royal Hours, which is celebrated Holy Friday morning, one of the hymns from Royal Hours goes like this:

When thou wast led to the cross, O Lord, thou didst say, “For what act do ye wish, O Jews, to crucify me? Is it because I have strengthened your cripples? It is because I raised your dead as from the sleep? Healed the woman of her issue of blood and showed mercy upon the Canaanitish woman? For what act, O ye Jews, desire ye my death?” But ye shall behold him whom ye pierced, O law-transgressors, and know that he is Christ.

So that’s that one hymn. This is not something that is… Like, it’s not new. There are some people who look at these and are like: “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” But actually this is just a recapitulation of themes from the Scriptures, and again, indeed, from the Old Testament. So we’re going to give an example from the Old Testament that is the same kind of thing, same words—

Fr. Stephen: Although there are plenty of these as well.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there are lots. There are lots! This is not the exact same words, but I think you’re going to hear the same kind of theme here, and with a similar kind of rhetoric. This is from Jeremiah 3:19-21. This is God speaking.

“I thought how I would set you among my sons and give you a pleasant land—”

This is God speaking to Israel, by the way.

“—a heritage most beauteous of all nations. And I thought you would call me, “My father,” and would not turn from following me. Surely as a faithless wife leaves her husband, so you have been faithless to me, O house of Israel,” says Yahweh. A voice on the bare heights is heard, a weeping and pleading of Israel’s sons, because they have perverted their way; they have forgotten the Lord their God.

So again it’s this sort of— as, of course, is typical of Jeremiah, this type of lamenting, God saying, “I did this for you, I did this for you, I did this for you, and yet—you turned away. And yet—you sinned against me.” So it’s the exact same kind of rhetoric in both that Holy Week hymn and then this particular example from Jeremiah. But, again, lots— many such cases, both from Holy Week and from the Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And this should help us understand what’s going on in these Holy Week texts, because unfortunately we have some folks who don’t understand what is going on in these Holy Week texts.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there are people who look at the Holy Week texts and see these things, these critical things, addressed to Israel—

Fr. Stephen: Or the Jews, like in this case.

Fr. Andrew: —or the Jews, yeah. Or “Judeans” is a better translation, although—

Fr. Stephen: But the way it reads in English is usually “the Jews.”

Fr. Andrew: “The Jews,” right. And they say, “Well, that’s anti-Semitism. That’s blame-shifting. That’s—” whatever. And what I’ll say to that is— And we’ll get much deeper into why that’s so super wrong— But there’s a very elementary way to know why that’s wrong without getting into the deeper reason, which is way more interesting, by the way. But the elementary reason is that it should be very clear. The historical context of the events of the gospels is first-century Palestine. There’s nothing in those hymns and there’s nothing in the Old Testament texts—particularly there’s nothing in those hymns when it’s talking about Jesus’ Passion and death and so forth—that is assigning this to some racial group. It’s addressed to the people who were there and did those things at the time.

And, as we have pointed out in the atonement episode, as I recall, and when this has been talked about, blood being on people, you look at the Torah: when blood goes upon people, it’s to cleanse them. So that language that’s in the Scriptures that sometimes people say is anti-Semitic, “His blood be upon us and on our children,” is actually a prophecy about Christ’s atonement, about Christ’s cleansing of the world. So it’s actually a blessing.

Now, is it the case that some people in history have looked at these kinds of texts, whether it’s hymns or stuff in the Scriptures and so forth, and have turned it into actual racist, anti-Semitism, hate-all-Jews-everywhere-everywhen? Yes, they have. That is wrong. That is a misreading of the Scriptures; that is a misreading of these hymns. On its face, it’s a misreading, but let’s look underneath the face a little bit and see the deeper reason why this is a very wrong way to read this stuff.

Fr. Stephen: And, to clarify that, too, remember, ideas don’t cause things.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed, no!

Fr. Stephen: People who have hated the Jewish people for a variety of reasons—social, cultural, economic, all kinds of reasons—have weaponized these texts against them. Yeah. But so the core of the issue here is—and this is in line with a lot of critiques we’ve made of liberal theological movements—that you have people of a certain liberal sensibility and they realize that part of understanding what the Scriptures say—the Christian Scriptures say and early Christian hymnography and the Church Fathers and, and, and— Part of what that means, when we say that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah— Because, by the way, nobody else had a Messiah. The Norwegians, the Romans, the Chinese people were not waiting for a Messiah. So when we say Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, that kind of entails that that means a Jewish person who doesn’t accept Jesus as the Messiah is rejecting their Messiah.

And if we accept that Jesus is— Jesus embodies the God of Israel, then a Jewish person who rejects that is, to some extent, rejecting who their God is. And if we accept that the Hebrew Scriptures are teaching about Jesus as the Messiah, then we’re saying to Jewish people that they don’t understand their Bible; they don’t understand their Scriptures correctly. People of a certain liberal sensibility don’t want to say those things, the second part of all of those statements. It offends their sensibilities to say that about Jewish people. And because the worst thing that can happen to them is for them to appear bad in public or to face some kind of accusation like that they were anti-Semitic or something, they decide to go the whole route and just become anti-Semitic. What do I mean by that?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: In order to not say that Jewish people have not accepted their Messiah by not accepting Jesus, they try to get rid of the idea that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. And this warps and skews their theology until Jesus just becomes “the Savior of the world.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which he is, but not…

Fr. Stephen: But his Jewishness gets ripped away. And we don’t want to say that Jewish people have misunderstood their God whom they worship, so he’s no longer the God of Israel. All the Jewishness gets stripped away. Now he’s just Plato’s God or God in general, the God of the whole universe, the God who created everything, just God god.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— That is the basis for why people reject the kind of language that we’ve just been reading. If you regard God as sort of the generic God, the Platonic God that’s out there somewhere, contemplating himself, then the idea that you would inject the specificity of the relationship of God with his people Israel—that’s necessitated, then. You have to reject that specificity, because doesn’t that seem weird, that he’s the God of only these people? But that is what the Scripture says, is that he’s the God of Israel. And for him to then be— I mean, there’s a sense in which he’s the God of every single person, place, and thing in the universe, that is true, but he has also revealed himself as the God of Israel. And that means that his relationship to Israel is different than his relationship to everything else, which means, then, if you want that relationship, you have to become part of Israel, which is what the Church is. I’m sure in a future episode we’ll go into some great detail about that relationship, but, yeah, you can’t escape the Israel stuff. You can’t escape the Jewish stuff and be an actual Christian.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they don’t want to say Jewish people have misunderstood the Hebrew Scriptures, their Bible, and so they say we’re just going to ignore the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, again, that’s the core of Israel. That’s the core to be Jewish, is those Scriptures.

Fr. Stephen: “So as Christians we just won’t read that or talk about it at all, and we’ll warp our reading of the New Testament so that it doesn’t require the Old Testament. And we’ll take it in this other direction where it’s disconnected.”

Fr. Andrew: Sorry, crypto-Marcianites.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. And so this is the most anti-Semitic thing possible, because what you end up with is a white liberal enlightened religious class that has this universal religion with a universal God and a universal Savior, and then, oh, well, yeah, we let the Jews go and do their thing in the corner over there, and we let them be and we respect their traditions. Which is infantilizing to them. That’s anti-Semitism, folks. The people who want to edit your Holy Week book and take out all the references to the Jews, the people who want to make Christianity not Jewish any more, they’re the anti-Semites. They’re the ones with the colonial attitude. That’s where they’ve ended up. So don’t get confused about that. In their concern for their public reputation and not wanting to be accused of anything or look anti-Semitic, they go mask-off with their actual anti-Semitism.

So, that rant done—kind of; I’m going to revisit that in my final comments, so get ready…

Fr. Andrew: All right!

Fr. Stephen: But what we’ve been talking about in this third half is how Jesus embodies the God of Israel, who’s a very particular God: the living God, the actual God. But we’ve done that again. We’re not saying this is all that’s to be said about that. We’re not saying any of those things, but this is a way of approaching it from the bottom-up in terms of the people who encountered Jesus and first encountered him as, as far as they could initially tell, a human, how they came to understand that he embodied Israel’s God and how that was part of what led them to identify him as the Messiah.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, just to give my own final thoughts— I’m not going to be throwing out any anti-Semitism mic-drops. I will leave that to you, my friend, although I enjoyed it a lot. You know, this episode for me has been very illuminating because one of the core questions in the gospels that Jesus asks people is “Who do you say that I am?” And it’s not like a quiz when he says that to them, like: “Let me see how much Christology you guys got down. So who do you say that I am?” And of course the response is: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. You are the Messiah.” They recognize that he was the Messiah. We just spend the last couple hours going over exactly what that means, when St. Peter said that, when anyone else said that. I should mention, by the way, that it was St. Andrew who first introduced St. Peter to Jesus and said: Messiah. Just got to get that in there.

So how does that apply for us? It’s useful and valuable to ask, “Okay, what did people in the first century, in first-century Palestine, how did they understand this Man that they met? Why did they say that he was the Messiah?” How does that apply for us? Because it might come across as some sort of: “Well, this is a very interesting intellectual exercise, casting our minds back 2,000 years and seeing what they might have seen and try to imagine for ourselves, but now we live in this point where all or most of the prophecies have been fulfilled, and so on and so forth, so how does that apply?”

So here’s the thing. For someone to be a Christian means that they have met Christ. It means that they had the experience that St. John talks about at the end of his gospel, where he says, “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ and that, believing, you may have life in his name.” Of course, as we’ve said I don’t know how many thousand times in this podcast, “believing” there is not just about agreeing; it’s about becoming faithful. “So these are written, that you may be faithful to Jesus the Christ, and that, being faithful, you may have life in his name.” That is another way to read that exact same verse.

What does it mean for us to have that meeting with Christ, to become faithful to that revelation of him as the Messiah? Well, it means a lot of different things for different people, and by that I don’t mean “well, whatever it means to you.” I don’t mean that. I’m not throwing out some kind of theological relativism, but I am saying that people encounter the Lord Jesus Christ in different ways. He reveals himself to people in different ways. Some people, they enter into the beauty and the worship of the Church, and they meet God. There’s hardly any other way to describe it: they meet him; they meet the Lord Jesus. Some people, they study the Scriptures very closely and, over time, the realization comes upon them, and Christ reveals himself to them through their experience of the Scriptures. Some people receive unconditional love from someone. And, let’s face it, that is a rarer commodity in this world than it should be, even from family. And in that unconditional love, Christ reveals himself to them. And for many people it’s some combination of those things or something else, but it’s coming upon that Truth, and by that I don’t just mean a mental understanding but the Truth, knowing—knowing—that he is the Christ, that he is the Messiah, that he is the One that we have hoped for. That’s how the apostles put it.

That’s how the apostles put it, and that’s the basis for our being Christian, is that we’ve encountered Christ; we’ve found him, and this is where we’re going to follow him, is here in the Church, because this is his body. This is where he is, this is where he’s revealing himself, this is where when we say, “Christ is in our midst,” it really is true. Christ is in our midst. And so when we talk about who Jesus is, it’s not about Christology as some kind of precise theological academic discipline, although it’s important to have that precise theological language, but, as Fr. Stephen said earlier, the point of that dogmatic language is to create boundaries past which we don’t wander off.

The dogmatic language does not encapsulate who the Lord Jesus is; it just puts those boundaries around the edge. There is an encounter with the risen Christ, an encounter with Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah of Israel, that each of us has and can have and sometimes begins at one point and unfolds over a lifetime. There’s a whole narrative dynamic to it for each one of us. I’m not talking about some kind of woo-woo spiritual experience—although some people probably have spiritual experiences that can be described in that way! That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the revelation of Christ to you. Father, I’ve heard you say in the past that when someone comes to your parish— I mean, I agree with this. Someone comes to your parish and they want to become Orthodox for any reason other than “Here I meet Christ; here I see Christ; here I wish to follow Christ,” then it’s not time for them yet, because this is what Christianity is. It’s the way of life in which we encounter the Lord Jesus and we follow him and we become more like him and we are incorporated into him. That’s what Christianity is. All the other things that get— that sort of fan out from that can be very important and helpful and so on and so forth, but there is a center, and this is what it is.

This is why the Gospel is preached. This is why the Gospel is that Jesus is the Messiah. That is why that is a central part of that proclamation: this is who he is; this is what he did; this is what he expects from us. And so my hope for this episode is that it will have contributed—to those of you who are listening to this, it will have contributed to your vision of Jesus as the Messiah, as the One sent by God, the Anointed One sent by God, to be the Savior of Israel and the Savior, inasmuch as we are incorporated into Israel, of the world, and the One who has reclaimed his throne in the heavens and whose kingdom shall have no end. So that’s what I have to say about that.

Fr. Stephen: So one of the things we’ve lost in the contemporary world is a sense of heritage, and that’s for a whole pile of reasons: Late capitalism turning us all into consumers, units of consumption; before that it was units of labor. Intense individualism: we see our own life as a story and an end in and of itself. We don’t see ourselves having any real, direct connection to our ancestors beyond, you know, the curiosity of going and figuring out our family tree and learning about them maybe, but we certainly don’t see them as sort of living on in us, or we don’t interpret our personal experience and our personal identity in terms of their experience any more.

What do I mean by that? Well, if you read—as of course I do, being a priest, every time I celebrate the Liturgy— If you read the prayers in the anaphora of the Divine Liturgy, whether we’re talking about St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom, what you find is— You get a sense of the identity of the people, of the community that is praying these prayers, and the heritage. It’s expressed as an experience of the people there are praying them, sort of parallel to, in the way in Passover, when Passover was being celebrated, was that it was not the family saying, “This is the day on which our ancestors were brought out of Egypt”; it’s: “This is the night we were brought out of Egypt. We were slaves in Egypt, us, sitting around this table.”

But what you find in the Divine Liturgy, because our Divine Liturgy prayers come from communities that were not primarily—honestly, not even significantly—Jewish by that point, is you find a reflection of the actual experience of us Gentiles, which is that God called us away and set us free from the worship of idols. That God brought us from idolatry, sexual immorality, violence, all of those things, to worship the true and living God, the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And it’s expressed in the prayers as happening to us who are gathered there, not my distant ancestors: us. And it’s a sense of identity and heritage that I don’t think is real for a lot of us as Christians any more. In fact, a lot of people balk at it. One of the harshest responses I get from people is when I point out and someone Greek hears it that—sorry, Greek folks, I love you, but your ancestors were demon-worshiping pederasts. It’s what they were. Forget about the democracy stuff…

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, it’s true for almost all of us.

Fr. Stephen: Right! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Pretty much.

Fr. Stephen: I’m getting there! Forget the democracy stuff; forget the other stuff. That was the reality. And then a Jewish guy named Saul of Tarsus showed up—he showed up in Athens; he showed up in Corinth; he showed up in Thessaloniki—and he spoke to your ancestors, and he told your ancestors about the true and living God. And he told your ancestors about the Jewish Messiah, and he explained the Hebrew Scriptures, translated into Greek for their sake, to your ancestors so that they could leave that and be set free from that to worship the true and living God. As Jesus says in St. John’s gospel, “Salvation is from the Jews.”

As I just said to Fr. Andrew, I’m getting to it. While that was happening and the Greeks were starting to become Christians, my ancestors were still painting themselves blue and dancing around fires and killing and eating their neighboring tribesmen, okay, so I’m not saying mine were better. But eventually the Gospel got up there, too, to the lowlands. Eventually it got there. I’m also part Greek, by the way; it’s a small part, but… That’s what happened, and that’s part of who I am and who you are as a Gentile Christian. That’s part of our story. Our story is a story of getting grafted in, as St. Paul says, to the Tree that has Abraham as its root, so that Abraham is the father of many nations. So that Jewish heritage becomes part, spiritually, of my heritage.

But there’s this danger that comes, as we were saying in my previous rant, of people who want to de-particuarlize the Gospel, who want to remove the Jewishness of Christianity. Christianity is Judaism. It is a form of Judaism—not it was; it is. Our argument with Rabbinic Judaism is who’s right about Judaism. It’s not about— It’s not two different religions; it’s who has Judaism right, who has the Torah right, who has the Messiah right. That’s the disagreement.

And to try to de-Judaize the Scriptures, to de-Judaize Christianity, will always distort what Christianity is, will always warp what Christianity is. The concern that people currently have about not wanting to look anti-Semitic or being queasy about disagreeing with Jewish people about their own Scriptures needs to be redirected, needs to be redirected the way St. Paul directed it. Rather than being concerned about how we look, we should be concerned about the salvation of Jewish people. We should long for a day and pray that a day comes when the patriarchate of Jerusalem gets overtaken by waves of Jewish people embracing Jesus as the Messiah and becoming Christians. That should be a day that we hope and pray will come.

But what that requires is actual love for Jewish people, not wanting to justify myself and appear anti-Semitic or hateful or judgmental, not having a condescending attitude toward Jewish people: “We’ll let them have their religion.” That requires me to actually love them, to want them to fully embrace the truth of their Messiah, their God, their heritage, their covenants. That’s the attitude we see reflected in Christ, in St. Paul, in the Scriptures, in the Church, in our liturgics, and that’s the attitude we need to shift back to having. And the way back to that, I think, comes from re-embracing the truth of our heritage, that I was once an idolater, I was once lost in immorality, I was once lost in violence and bloodshed, and then the word came to me about the Jewish Messiah, and that person I was died and a new person came into existence, and that new person has Abraham as a father. So those are my final thoughts.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Amen. That is our show for tonight, everyone. Thank you very much for listening. If we didn’t actually get to talk to you live tonight—which, we didn’t actually get any calls tonight about any of this, but we’d still like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits, and if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or need help finding a parish, head over to OrthodoxIntro.org.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. “You’ve got your arms held out like you’ve been carrying a load. You swear to me you don’t want to be my slave, staring at me like I need to be saved.”

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Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you, good night! God bless you!